Go! Go! GOTY! 2022: Norco

• Game: Geography of Robots's Norco.
• Release Month: March.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 23/01.
• Completed: 25/01.

Man, what is with 2022 and weirdass narratives? First Signalis and now this. Norco is a traditional point-and-click game with a vaguely '90s pixel aesthetic but when I say traditional the general game mechanics are really the only thing to which that term applies. Set in the titular town in south Louisiana, a few clicks west of New Orleans and the Mississippi delta, and in some unspecified point in the near future, the game follows the mostly faceless Kay Madére: an itinerant soul who departed her hometown after a falling out with her prickly mother, Catherine. Returning to Norco a few weeks after Catherine passes from cancer to pay her last respects and check in on her unreliable younger brother Blake, Kay finds herself embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy revolving around her now missing brother, her mother's research, an unscrupulous oil mining corporation called Shield that owns most of the local territory, a cult hanging out at a disused mall, a rogue superintelligence, and an unknown and (possibly) extraterrestrial being spotted in the swamp.

What makes Norco work as both a style exercise and a game, though, is that it carefully considers both halves of that equation and finds a means for both to coexist without one bleeding into the other in an inopportune way. What I mean by that is when you make a game that sets out to be as deliberately eccentric and occasionally inscrutable as Norco the gameplay often suffers in kind, putting players through a layer of mechanical absurdity to match the narrative one, which only serves to make them disoriented and frustrated in the long-term. This was a common issue I had with Kentucky Route Zero—a game I feel Norco owes a lot to, considering its juxtaposition of magical sci-fi realism with the usual miseries that accompany living close to the poverty line in a coldly indifferent version of the American South—but Norco, to its credit, side-steps it by making the video game half of itself as accessible as possible. The interface is familiar, using a mini-map of nearby nodes that resembles that from the old MacVenture series, and has a relatively small amount of inventory or quest objectives or hotspot nodes to juggle at any given moment. There's also a button to summon all the hotspots in the vicinity and a means of revisiting every element of the story so far in case you get lost. All the usual modern amenities and more besides.

It also has its little indulgences with regards to a few mini-games and puzzles, but in both cases they've been simplified and made straightforward to an extent that you don't really need to worry about getting stuck on any of them. This might make the game a bit on the easy side for adventure game diehards, but speaking as one of those I'm always more into games that have a lot to say, or have memorable hooks and pivotal moments and imaginative puzzles, than I am being constantly challenged to figure out which single item in the giant stockpile of crap I'm hoofing around is the one I'm meant to use in a given scenario. A good example of Norco's accessibility in action is a relatively late-game puzzle where you need to study a map with a series of flashing lights, each pulsing at different speeds, and then recreate it when exploring the bayous: since the game knows you've done the due diligence of looking at the map beforehand it'll actually make the correct light pulse speed show up as green instead of red when activating them so you don't have to keep checking back (or be forced to write down beforehand) to see if you have the pattern right. It might trivialize the puzzle's difficulty, but at that point you've already figured what the goal is and you're simply executing on the sequence so there's no reason for it to delay the tale it wants to tell any further. (Either that or I triggered an easy mode without realizing it.)

All that said, the game does find logical ways to tie in its bizarre narrative with the moment-to-moment puzzle-solving in a manner that feels germane to its atmosphere. Kay's "Mind Map", for instance, is a mental flowchart of all the information she's learned and the connections between various points, people, and objects of interest she's learned about. You can consult this odd-looking chart at any time to recall how something is related to someone or vice versa in case you need a refresher, providing it a valid purpose for existing, while still being this very strange presence in your UI with a roundabout method of delivering its recap information. The game also switches from Kay's perspective a few times to that of Catherine (these sequences taking place before she dies, in case you thought something real hinky was going on) to help fill in some character backstory while still offering an intriguing mystery of its own that of course ties into the present day one.

I guess if I had to use a word to describe how I felt while playing Norco, it was excitement. It became impossible to tell where the story would go next, or what mini-game I'd have to deal with, or what sights I would end up seeing upon reaching my next destination. Odd asides like the way the game has turn-based RPG combat that feels mostly perfunctory, like it serves to symbolically represent a conflict rather than one where you're actually trading blows back and forth with corporate androids or the local drunk deadbeat. You have a party during most stages of the game that will help you in combat but are really just there to serve suggestions, hints, and commentary on your immediate situation. There's a random puppet show that takes up a good fifteen minutes where you're exploring the bayou hunting either a gator or the "Shrimp Man" for the sake of the other (which turns out to be a backdoor tutorial for a later bayou-trawling sequence). There's a point where you need to score horrible drugs for some teens whom you meet after breaking into their secret base by gathering Biblically-themed clues through an AR app scavenger hunt. The game takes all this in stride and invites you to join its wavelength, and it got a lot more enjoyable when I decided to go along with its flow rather than spending too long thinking about any one lead or possible red herring: I now feel like this is what the greater accessibility and easy lay-ups that are the puzzles were all in aid of. I guess a good analogy would be something like The Big Lebowski, where the driving force of the conspiracy plot becomes ever less important as the story progresses through one incongruous encounter to the next.

I also think, most vitally, that Norco is exceptionally well-written. It does the Gothic noir thing of having a lot of meaningful narration rich with metaphor and semiotics accompanying some really striking (if pixellated) images of either the near-future Louisiana as you'd expect it to look or some dreamlike surreal visuals like some The Great Gatsby-ass giant eyes in the sky that could belong to anyone or no-one. Along with Citizen Sleeper, there are some talented storytellers out there that are really starting to find a home in video games and the narratives only they can spin, or at least spin with this much depth and panache. Amidst the surrealism there's plenty of relatable material here on trying (perhaps fruitlessly) to find yourself on the open roads, of spirituality and lapsed Catholicism, of the familial bonds that connect us even if they get a little frayed at the edges over time, of the new and terrifying issues we'll need to deal with as technology continues to advance unfettered, of how Louisiana's very damp and fetid fate is more or less sealed with the rigors of ongoing climate change and how that's sapped a lot of the motivation from the folk living in those parts to continue building a life for themselves there (which feels like the game at its most personal, given the development studio is also based in that region), and how kids named Garrett tend to be mostly scumbags if not necessarily Nazis. For all its serious capital-T Themes the game has more levity than I was perhaps expecting as well, so don't go into it thinking it's going to hit you with five Radiohead albums' worth of unremitting sad like Kentucky Route Zero does: I'm sure I chuckled a few times at the utterly deadpan reactions to sights and occurrences that would usually warrant something a lot stronger. Really liked what Geography of Robots put together here and am happy to recommend Norco to anyone who likes adventure gaming, whether they're old hands or greenhorns.

Current GOTY

1. Elden Ring
2. Tinykin
3. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
4. PowerWash Simulator
5. Vampire Survivors
6. Norco
7. Citizen Sleeper
8. Tunic
9. Signalis
10. Return to Monkey Island
11. HoloCure
12. Nobody Saves the World
13. Escape Academy
14. Ghost Song
15. Infernax
16. Super Kiwi 64
17. Immortality

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